This forum crashes quite often, from my POV.
So when I surf here at low traffic times ( Sunday morning, in Europe ),
if I answer a single message,
it looks as if this single editing of a forums message might crash the server, mostly for several hours.
Always - from my point of view - when I tried to send an answer.
It was never worth to wait for the server to be online again, so the server was not online again after 5 minutes, but after several hours.
Is my experience right ?!
So crashing the forum happened a handful of times, not just 1 time, within the last 6 months. I have never made such experience before with a single forum.

Sometimes the whole domain is broken, but often its just the forum.

I Know that all this is mostly free unpaid work,
but either the forum software is still buggy ( its not a dokuwiki code project ?!), or the site environment at the datacenter is quit unstable. Or something else is wrong. I am shure that its not just "bad luck" of me to be present when the forum crashed.

I don't know about the server setup for Dokuwiki and the forum, but I have experience running a small server with limited resources. My greatest problem is that sometimes bots, worms, fishing probes, etc come flying in at lightning speed, all in a short space of time. The web server can't handle the load and crashes. The company that hosts the server has safeguards, and I have my own, to get the server back up and running; but there are times that the server can be down for a few hours before anyone is aware of it.

Dokuwiki is a huge project with a small core of open source developers. I'm not sure if lack of server resources is a problem for them, but there's a tiny donate button at the bottom of the page. Perhaps if enough people hit that button, they'd have a bigger server with more resources. As the developer of DokuWikiFCK and fckgLite, I'm aware of what is happening with the FCKeditor. They've gone the way of Red Hat. That is, they are still open source, which their original pact with their user base requires. But now they've switched over to CKEditor, which is a fee for service company. I suppose if Dokuwiki took that route, the server would rarely go down, but those of us who weren't paying would be the losers.

I don't want discourage anyone to donate for a bigger server , but the real problem is a problem with the fastCGI processes on the server. It can happen that they hang forever. Normally your client (browser) would get another process assigned to handle your request, this however fails sometimes, thus, for you it seems as if the forum is down, but it's actually not. AFAIK stale fastCGI processes are killed every 2hours to temporarily circumvent this issue until there's a fix (it could be this bug http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=45254). However, until that happens this is the only thing we can do. Switching webservers isn't an option.

Please add [SOLVED] to the initial thread subject if you feel your question has been answered.
If my answer doesn't make sense maybe your question didn't either - just visit http://facepalm.org.

It can happen that they hang forever. Normally your client (browser) would get another process assigned to handle your request, this however fails sometimes, thus, for you it seems as if the forum is down, but it's actually not. AFAIK stale fastCGI processes are killed every 2hours to temporarily circumvent this issue until there's a fix

Thanks, but I don´t know this from any other forum or server.

a)
So if it should happen again, I should try after 2 hours , but not earlier.
I did not know, maybe you should publish this to all users ?!

b)
I have a typical DSL dynamic IP.
is there anything I can do with my computer ( deleting a cookie ? somehow forcing to get a new dynamic IP, by switching off the DSL modem ? ), so that the forum server assigns new task to my browser ?

c)
## it just happened again, when I wrote this text at early Monday morning ( CET = European time ). ##

d)
Might you should switch to more stable, traditional technologies ?

Sincerely
Rolf

This post was edited 2 times, last on 2009-12-22, 08:25 by hemmerling.

I don't think that would have worked last night, when I tried accessing the forum with a variety of browsers and three different OSes. But, out of curiosity, I found that I could wget the first forum page from my VPS, which is hosted in another city, and I was able use ELinks to see if my post had been successful.

Well, it froze again this a.m. when I was trying to post the above and the cookie thing may have helped. But obviously that's pretty unscientific, given last night's problems. It is frustrating.

Same behavior here. Incidentally, I tried opening up the forum in another browser (Chrome when I use FF as my main browser) and it loaded there. But I remember that in the past, I tried another browser as well and it didn't "fix" the problem so it might have been just luck this time because the forum then loaded in FF as well.

I don't think so... Firefox is "just" waiting forever and does not close the connection -> he does handle the error not as good as other browsers.

If you run ubuntu/linux, you may try the

w3m

text browser -> He shows you a clear message "Connection to http://forum.dokuwiki.org failed". Chrome and others simply will work again (Firefox only after closing it completely) when the forum is coming back.

Just found another interesting thing. It seems like you can access the forum again by simply deleting your cookies. I'm not sure why and what causes this, but that's finally a new trace to follow....

Andi:

You yo have any idea or pointer as of which one/s of the various cookies that the forum sets might be the culprit? I'm pretty sure neither the session cookie nor the UnbUser are involved, mostly because in browsers I have (Opera 10.10 and Fireofx 3.5, both on Linux) they seem to be OK, whereas I get duplicated cookies for all the other values (such as UnbTimezone, which may get ~15 repeated cookies if I leave the browser running for too long) and at least in Firefox removing some of the duplicates seems to trigger the "never complete loading" issue. Removing all cookies does the trick as mentioned above, however.

I can browse the forums no problem, but if I try and post it just times out endlessly....and the only thing to do is shut the browser, sometimes even restart the Mac. This happens in all the browsers I use on the Mac, Firefox 3.5, Camino, Safari and Opera.

After one of these timeout I tried to log into the main site and just got a 403 Forbidden notice.....took an hour or so to clear and regain access.

I have experienced along the year this accident too.
I was thinking arrgh my chromium is not so fun ....
and then my firefox etc...
Finally today everything is fine:! i could edit post and navigate again easy.